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help does not work for most tensorflow operations #7416

@dfalbel

Description

@dfalbel

System details:

Positron and OS details:

Positron Version: 2025.05.0 (Universal) build 35
Code - OSS Version: 1.98.0
Commit: ee0feaba9d71a3e9feef765e8c3a46aeb3273741
Date: 2025-04-09T03:27:32.927Z
Electron: 34.2.0
Chromium: 132.0.6834.196
Node.js: 20.18.2
V8: 13.2.152.36-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.3.0

Interpreter details:

Python 3.10.13
TensorFlow 2.19.0

Describe the issue:

When trying to browse the help for some tensorflow functions, we get ValueError: No help found for topic: tensorflow.python.ops.math_ops

Steps to reproduce the issue:

Run:

import tensorflow as tf
help(tf.abs)

I'd expect the docs for the abs function to be shown but instead I get:

ValueError: No help found for topic: tensorflow.python.ops.math_ops.abs.

The reason that happens is that we use a qualname redirect to find the docuemntation topic for functions, but that does not resolve correctly in TensorFlow objects because the modules are somehow structured differently.

https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/blob/4b06c2d46546a2eb732e524963e02810dd51d135/extensions/positron-python/python_files/posit/positron/help.py#L111-L143

I wonder if we could instead use pydoc.render_doc(tf.abs) which would show the correct document.

Expected or desired behavior:

Should show the documentation for the function.

Were there any error messages in the UI, Output panel, or Developer Tools console?

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